linux gedit: I always get "GConf Error: failed to contact configuration server ..."

linux gedit
jldupont picture jldupont · Sep 14, 2009 · Viewed 37.9k times · Source

How come I always get

"GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)"

when I start 'gedit' from a shell from my superuser account?

Answer

Kevin Wright picture Kevin Wright · Nov 3, 2009

I've been using GUI apps as a logged-in user and as a secondary user for 15+ years on various UNIX machines. There's plenty of good reasons to do so (remote shell, testing of configuration files, running multiple sessions of programs that only allow one instance per user, etc).

There's a bug at launchpad that explains how to eliminate this message by setting the following environment variable.

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=""

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